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Smart aliens should try the message in a bottle

RATHER than transmitting radio messages, extraterrestrial civilisations would find it far more efficient to send us a “message in a bottle” – some kind of physical message inscribed on matter. And it could be waiting for us in our own backyard.

That’s the conclusion of a new analysis of interstellar communications by Christopher Rose of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Gregory Wright, a physicist with Antiope Associates also in New Jersey. Assuming the aliens don’t care how long it takes for their message to arrive, beaming a radio signal that can be detected 10,000 light years away, for instance, would take a million billion times as …